Critical Incident 1

The first thing that jumped out at me when the concept of critical incidents was discussed in a reflection seminar was a positive thing – or at least something which at the time, felt very positive. Interestingly, some of the methodology sessions since that seminar have notably altered my understanding of the incident, and whilst this certainly makes the whole experience a more positive influence on my development, I now see what happened as revealing some less-than-perfect attitudes in myself.

This summer I had been teaching an exhausting A1 class, some of whom had been pretty badly mis-sold an elementary course when what they really needed was beginner level, and all of whom were Saudi Arabian boys between the age of 18 and 22. I was sharing the class with another teacher, and we found it very difficult, and often frustrating, to encourage the students to meet us halfway and involve themselves in the process. We ended up repeating the same language points and communicative skills every couple of weeks, because we couldn’t move on unless basic foundations had been laid, but lack of attention and application meant that only one or two students took the opportunities we gave them to acquire new skills. A lot of time and energy was spent on classroom management, of the ‘crowd control’ variety.

An area which was proving especially difficult was reading; most of the students by this point were able to decode written English text, and they had enough vocabulary to get something out of the material we were using, but they lacked the motivation to tackle texts longer than one sentence without just getting bored and translating the whole thing. We took phones out of the equation, so translation wasn’t an option to find meaning in the text, but they were totally unwilling to cognitively stretch themselves enough to discover what information they needed to know, and to then find it in a short text. This is a necessary skill to survive in English.

I tried to see it from their point of view, and took a new approach to reading activities with this class. I imagined that seeing a chunk of written text in a new script which you can’t easily decode is daunting, and if your motivation is low, sufficiently demoralising to make you give up trying. I credited them with some desire to succeed, but just not enough to overcome these obstacles. So, instead of comprehension questions, I used gapped information taken from the text. All they had to do then was look for the exact same sentence in the text, and find the missing information. This was a degree of effort they were comfortable with – the activity was a success, they found the relevant information, and were quite pleased with themselves.

My immediate reaction was a real sense of pride in the students for their attainment of something which had been beyond them until then – productively engaging with a written text of any length – and a new surge of personal motivation for the rest of the term with that class. I was genuinely excited about the progress we could make from that point, when to be honest I had been slightly resigned to stagnation and lack of progress in some of the students. We did, in fact, build on that to work up to more cognitively demanding reading activities step by step, facilitated by the boost in student motivation and engagement. I could see that they were excited about having achieved this too.

It was a bit of a turning point for that term concerning the atmosphere in that classroom, and we went on to work well together – they were more willing to challenge themselves, and I saw the necessity of giving the benefit of the doubt, and trying harder to conceptualise the challenges they faced to learning so we could deal with them. However, soon afterwards I did feel a little guilty that I hadn’t done so before – why hadn’t I thought of this earlier? How could I have possibly justified resignation to lack of progress? Which opportunities had been missed because I hadn’t made an extra effort to empathise? Since then I’ve tried to be very conscientious in examining causes of difficulty from a learner’s point of view, and avoiding making assumptions about learners without investigating different possibilities.

I still view this episode as an important piece of a learning curve, and I think about it sometimes to give me a little push to find a new way of helping a learner overcome a challenge or obstacle. At the same time, though, I’m less convinced now about how beneficial the initial reading activity I used was, other than for building confidence and motivation. During week 11 of the Methodology module, when discussing receptive skills, Barbara showed us a text of utter gobbledegook and six comprehension questions, all of which we easily answered without having the first idea what either the questions or the text itself meant. Any communicative significance of the text was completely lost, and yet the task had been completed. My thought now is that I was reacting positively to the successful completion of a task by my A0/A1 group, and wasn’t really thinking about their ability to be competent decoders of a text – just their ability to sit down and apply themselves to something. This did set a precedent for more productive acquisition of other skills, but – as Jim Scrivener accuses CLT teaching of, in his argument for the necessity of ‘Demand High’ teaching – I was too focused on task completion and a ‘successful’ activity, and not focused enough on real learning taking place.

Still, you have to walk before you can run. I feel that managing students’ motivation, and considering affective factors on their motivation and engagement, is a worthy goal. If levels of motivation or engagement are presenting an obstruction to their learning, it’s a priority to address this before focusing on real learning and acquisition of language and skills. I must, however, remain vigilant! A successful activity of any kind should always be purposeful – as discussed with reference to speaking skills in week eight of the methodologies module – not just for its own sake.